On Sunday afternoon I attended a screening of The Act of Killing at City University of Hong Kong – the second time in a month that the Southeast Asia Research Centre had shown the movie and hosted a follow-up discussion forum. Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and anonymous collaborators, this two-hour documentary was released in 2012, and picked up a slew of awards in 2013 and 2014. Undeniably it is an important film. Whether it merits broad acclaim is not so clear to me.

The film focuses on Indonesia’s anti-communist purge of 1965-66, when at least half a million people, many of them Chinese, are known to have died at the hands of paramilitaries, gangsters and thugs. To probe how this could have happened, it invites a small band of mass murderers from North Sumatra to tell their stories however they wish. Remarkably, they agree to make a movie dramatizing the work of death squads, and over several years are depicted in kitschy scenes capturing the gothic horror of their gruesome pasts. Along the way, they talk about how good life was back then. “It was like we were killing happily!”

The film also addresses contemporary events. Pancasila Youth, active now as it was 50 years ago, holds rallies that keep squads of its 3 million members on and off the streets. A vice-president addresses a gathering. A deputy minister of youth and sport participates in the reenactment of a massacre. The surviving corps of executioners from the mid-1960s is shown in reduced circumstances of petty extortion, again aimed mainly at Chinese traders. In between, these old men display a variety of emotions about their savage lives: pride in a job well done, vanity, defiance, and some remorse.

Although the movie is banned in Indonesia, free downloads and bootleg DVDs are reportedly enabling many local people to comprehend for the first time what transpired in the early phases of the transition to Suharto’s New Order. This makes it a significant film, for it may open the door to a more truthful public history of a period that continues to be routinely whitewashed by the state. It could also resonate in other countries grappling with contentious issues from a brutal recent past.

But should this film be showered with praise? I don’t think so. It takes some of the worst criminals of the twentieth century, men with maybe 1000 deaths on their hands, and gives them a platform to review their lives. However they respond, and mostly their emotions are despicable, they remain vicious killers who have yet to face justice. Surely there are better ways to turn the spotlight on this dismal period in Indonesian history, as well as the pervasive culture of impunity that continues to disfigure this state.